Born on March 6, 1928, Gabriel García Márquez has been acclaimed as one of the finest Latin-American writers. Shortly after his birth, his parents surrendered him to his maternal grandparents, who raised him until he turned eight years old. He grew up in Aractaca, Colombia, a town nearby to the Caribbean where banana cultivation was the prime source of income. His grandfather, a retired colonel, was a Liberal veteran of the War of a Thousand Days, and often told Márquez stories of the battlefield. His grandmother was also a storyteller, and told the young Márquez tales of folklore, legends, and ghosts.
The history behind Márquez's mother and father provided the writer a basis for Love in the Time of Cholera, particularly for the character of Florentino Ariza. Like Florentino Ariza, Márquez's father, Gabriel Eligio Gracia, was known as somewhat of a philanderer in the community, and was rumored to have fathered four illegitimate children. Gracia courts Márquez's mother, Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán, as Florentino Ariza courts Fermina Daza in the novel, but the girl's father, the Colonel, who is comparable to Lorenzo Daza's character, discourages the romance from developing, on account of García's tarnished reputation. Gárcia woos his beloved Iguarán with violin serenades, love poems, and innumerable letters, just as Florentino woos Fermina in the novel.
Márquez's own life also parallels the events and characters of Love in the Time of Cholera. Like Fermina Daza's character, Márquez's love interest and future wife had asked that he wait until she had graduated from primary school to ask for her hand in marriage. The novel also reflects Márquez's own life when Florentino and Fermina are forced apart; Márquez had to wait fourteen years before he could marry his beloved, and during those fourteen years, she promised, as do Florentino and Fermina, to stay true throughout.
Obeying his parent's request, Márquez studied law and journalism at the National University in Bogota and at the University of Cartagena, but dropped out after three years of schooling, inspired by Kafka's The Metamorphosis, for it was not law he wanted to practice, but the craft of writing. Beginning in 1948, he worked as a journalist, traveling abroad to various locations in Latin America and Europe. His journalism career, to which he dedicated over ten years, led him to an interest in film. During the 1960's, Márquez moved to Mexico City, and in 1979, founded a film school near Havanna, Cuba. In 1982, he returned to his homeland, Colombia; later that same year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Márquez is best known for his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was published in 1967. He is regarded as one of the central figures of the Magic Realism movement in literature during the late 1940's. The term 'Magic Realism' was first used by the German critic Franz Roh in 1925 to classify a group of Post-Expressionist painters, but in the late 1940's, the term was adopted and applied to define a narrative tendency in Latin American writing. The literary movement, which lasted until 1970, can be defined as a preoccupation or interest in showing something common or daily into something unreal or strange.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino, the City of the Viceroy's most esteemed doctor, is sent to examine the body of his close friend and finest competitor at chess, Jeremiah Saint-Amour, who has killed himself at the age of sixty so that he will not grow old. The Doctor returns home and discovers that his pet parrot has escaped from his cage to the top of the mango tree outside. Dr. Urbino climbs a ladder to the branch on which the parrot sits, but just as he grasps the parrot, the Doctor falls to his death. Flo rentino Ariza professes, for a second time, his "eternal fidelity and everlasting love" to the Doctor and his wife, Fermina Daza. Fermina is horrified by such an insensitive display, and, for the first time, realizes the magnitude of the "drama" sh e had provoked at the age of eighteen.
Although Fermina Daza may have erased Florentino Ariza from her memory, he has not stopped thinking of her since their long, troubled love affair ended fifty-one years, nine months, and four days ago. Florentino first meets Fermina when he delivers a tele gram to her father, Lorenzo Daza, who is notorious for his shady dealings. After watching Fermina, always accompanied by her Aunt Escolástica, walk to school each day from the Park of the Evangels, Florentino works up the courage to approach her o ne day. He asks that she accept a letter from him, but she refuses because she is obligated to get her father's permission. He demands that she "get it," which she does the following week. Florentino decides to give her a subdued note (instead of the sixt y-page letter he had originally written) in which he resolutely declares his love for her. He is in agony as he awaits her reply, but is overjoyed when Fermina finally answers approvingly.
In the two years that follow, Fermina and Florentino see one another only in passing, though they write love letters daily. Florentino proposes marriage to Fermina, and again her reply is favorable. Fermina is caught writing a love letter by the Mother Su perior at her academy and is expelled. Lorenzo finds love letters in Fermina's room and as punishment, banishes Escolástica and forces Fermina to accompany him on a long journey, not to end until she has forgotten about Florentino. On the journey, Fermina meets and befriends her older cousin, Hildebranda Sánchez, who helps Florentino and Fermina communicate via telegraph messages.
Florentino hardly recognizes Fermina upon her return from the long journey, because, now seventeen, she has matured into a woman. He sees her in the Arcade of the Scribes, and approaches her. When Fermina sees him, she is suddenly disgusted with him and w ith herself for ever having been foolish enough to love him. Coolly, she tells Florentino to "forget it." Florentino tries once more to woo Fermina, but to no avail. In the fifty-one years, nine months, and four days that follow, not once does Florentino have the chance to speak or see his beloved Fermina in private. Initially, he vows to save his virginity for only Fermina, but after being seized by Rosalba aboard a ship to a faraway city, he turns to sex to ameliorate the pain he feels at having lo st Fermina. He returns home, intent upon once again making her his own. Meanwhile, he conducts affairs, however secret, with innumerable women, though he is rumored to be a homosexual.
Dr. Urbino courts Fermina, who resists his affections. Lorenzo Daza forces the Doctor upon his daughter, and she reluctantly concedes. When Florentino hears that Fermina is to marry a prestigious physician, he vows to make himself worthy of her. His uncle , Don Leo XII Loayza, gives him a job at the River Company of the Caribbean, of which, after thirty years, Florentino becomes President. Fermina and the Doctor honeymoon in Europe for three months. When Fermina returns, she is pregnant with her first child. Despite his determination to win Fermina, Florentino continues his lustful affairs with other women, whom he finds at the transient hotel and on the trolley. It is on the trolley that he meets Leona Cassiani, whom he mistakes for a whore. Leona asks him only for a job, which he gives to her.
Florentino realizes that he must wait, without violence or impatience, for Dr. Urbino to die before he can win over Fermina. When in public, he is greeted by Dr. Urbino with familiar cordiality, though Fermina lends only a courteous glance or smile, and w ithout memory of their past. Fermina and the Doctor appear to be a very happy couple, but in reality they are quite dissatisfied. The unhappy but stable marriage is rocked when Dr. Urbino conducts a four-month affair with Barbara Lynch, though he ends it when Fermina confronts him with her knowledge of it. Infuriated by her husband's infidelity, Fermina goes to live with Hildebranda on her ranch. The Doctor arrives at the ranch unannounced to take Fermina, who is overjoyed by his arrival, home with hi m.
Upon the Doctor's accidental death, Florentino, now elderly, abruptly ends his affair with fourteen-year-old América Vicuña and, at Dr. Urbino's wake, professes his "eternal fidelity and everlasting love" to Fermina. After havi. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
